Nutrition Strategies

How often do you eat?

Most people in Europe and Northern America eat three to four times a day: A breakfast, lunch, maybe an afternoon snack, and finally dinner.

We call this strategy "4-meal days".

This type of eating pattern doesn't work for all people. A commonly used strategy when training is "grazing", meaning eating most of the time. Sounds like an exaggeration, but eating six times a day feels like you have food in your mouth all the time.

We also support this eating strategy, and call it "Standard", because it is the most recommended strategy in the scientific literature.

Apart from that, we support two other nutrition strategies:

Sleep Low/Train Low is an experimental nutrition/workout coupling that works as follows: You eat your normal amount of calories and macronutrients, but with a twist: You have a training session scheduled in the evening, and the meal after that session does not contain any carbs (meaning all your carbs must be consumed before you train in the evening). Then, first thing in the morning the next day you train again. And only eat after that training session. This strategy looks promising when it comes to weight loss and improving VO2max, but it is still experimental and you should only consider doing it if you really know what your're doing.

Eat Low/Train Low days are only available if a corresponding workout is scheduled in the evening or the morning, respectively.

Finally, Time Restricted Eating is an interesting approach to fasting. Also called "intermittent fasting" it usually consists of an 8-hour eating window, followed by an 16 hour fasting period. The idea is not to go into a calorie deficit, but to restrict your energy intake to a certain period of the day. Nutrfy lets you specify the meals to keep and when your fasting window starts and stops.